Question

I have this piece of HTML:

</TABLE>
<HR>
<font size="+1"> Method and apparatus for re-sizing and zooming images by operating directly
     on their digital transforms
</font><BR>

and I am trying to capture the text inside font tag. This is my Regex:

  Regex regex = new Regex("</TABLE><HR><font size=\"+1\">(?<title>.*?)</font><BR>", RegexOptions.Singleline | RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);

        Match match = regex.Match(data);

        string title = match.Groups["title"].Value;

However I get empty title. Can anybody tell me what am I missing?

Answer 1

Your regex;

new Regex("</TABLE><HR><font size=\"+1\">(?<title>.*?)</font><BR>"

isn’t well formed since + has a distinct meaning in regex.

Based on your input string, what you want is really to have it escaped;

new Regex("</TABLE><HR><font size=\"\\+1\">(?<title>.*?)</font><BR>"

Also, if you want to match strings with newlines, you have to give a wildcard to ignore them too, so this may be even more what you’re trying to do;

new Regex("</TABLE>.*<HR>.*<font size=\"\\+1\">(?<title>.*?)</font>.*<BR>"